Shorter...no, verbatim Chafets: "We're all Cheneyites now."
President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals. Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach. The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days. Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli. The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won. We’re all Cheneyites now.
Um, no. President Obama has not been the most diametrically opposed to the Cheney/Bush policies of the past decade, it's true and that has frustrated his liberal base.
But if you recall, Zev, he tried to close Gitmo and in no uncertain terms was told off by, well, asshats like you and Rush Limbaugh and Weaker Boener that to do so would be tantamount to treason. Obama ended Cheney's war of choice in Iraq, for all intents and purposes. And Obama's Homeland Security department continues to thwart legitimate plots against the United States-- not the phonied up plots of the Sears Tower bombings-- by using old fashioned detective work.
And look, you win when the goals you set out to achieve-- finding WMDs-- is accomplished. If you move the goalposts to what you've actually accomplished, that's called a "compromise," not a victory.
Chafets continues to bloviate about how events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria justify the Cheney Doctrine of pre-emptive intervention, but they don't. The Arab summer would have happened under any circumstance, largely because it was internal strife, specifically shortages of food and jobs, that caused the uprisings.
Unless you want to make the case that the wars so bankrupted America that we were unable to prop up the shitty little dictators that the Republicans have been supporting for decades. That case I might give you but I'm not sure that, given the domestic economic fallout, it's a case you want to make.
The telling event in the book, the event Chafets ought to pay more attention to as he ponders the future of barbaric conservatism, especially in light of his deep support for all things Israeli, is the scene in 2007 in his book where Cheney insists on bombing Syria's nuclear reactor:
“After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
A room full of blood-thirsty, pro-Israel necons unanimously voted him down. There's the Bush administration in a nutshell: too little, too late, and too stupd.
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